Echoing Armey, pollster John Zogby said he has heard the same anecdotal evidence of Republican disenchantment. "Today I'm in Austin, Texas," Zogby said in a phone interview, "and my driver said, 'I've been a Republican all my life, but I can't support him [Bush].'"

Polling data is beginning to reflect the souring mood, he said. In a survey of likely voters taken May 10-13, Zogby found that President Bush had the support of 71 percent of self-described conservatives, but 19 percent were for John Kerry. "That's really intriguing to me because the president and the administration have spent the last four years shoring up their conservative base," Zogby said. "But the tide may be going back out for them."

In Armey's view, hardball players like Rove and DeLay have lost perspective in their single-minded pursuit of power. The signal case is Medicare, he said. Desperate to co-opt one of the Democrats' strongest campaign issues, the White House made passage of Medicare prescription drug benefits one of its top priorities. But the seniors whom the bill was meant to win over are in revolt, perplexed by the program's complexity and worried that it will encourage employers to drop private drug coverage from retirement benefits. Kerry holds a 20-point advantage over Bush in key battleground states on the question of who would better handle the rising costs of prescription drugs, according to a joint poll conducted last month by the Republican Tarrance Group and the Democratic firm of Lake, Snell and Perry.

On the day the prescription drug bill came before the House for final passage last November, Armey published an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal urging lawmakers to vote against it. "I believe that good policy is good politics," he wrote. "This is a case where bad politics has produced a bad policy proposal. Conservatives would be smart, and right, to reject it." Armey's breaking ranks incensed DeLay and Speaker Hastert, who were straining to ram the bill through.

Armey's encouragement of a mutiny may well have contributed to the extraordinary events on the floor of the House. Fiscal conservatives resisted "The Hammer," prompting Republican leaders to hold open a 15-minute vote for an unprecedented three hours, from 3 a.m. to dawn, as DeLay and other leaders pounded the holdouts. "There was a lot of heavy-handed, mean-spirited whipping going on," Armey said. In the end, the bill squeaked through.

Afterward, Hastert told Armey he was furious at his meddling, but the two made up. "It's always a healthier thing when two people who have a disappointing experience between them meet to say, 'Hey, my good friend, I know I let you down,'" Armey said. But there was no reconciliation with his fellow Texan. "Tom DeLay somehow saw it as a betrayal on my part, and he's not so quick to patch things up," Armey said.

In the long run, Armey says, Republicans will be stronger if they allow genuine internal debate. But that is hardly the trend in the House, where DeLay "has taken every norm the Legislature has operated on and shredded it," the AEI's Ornstein said. Once, Republicans lambasted Democrats, when they were in the majority, for denying them the opportunity to amend bills on the House floor. Today, congressional leaders have gone even further by barring Democrats from participating in key conference committees, where final deals on legislation are worked out. In Texas, DeLay engineered a mid-decade redistricting of congressional seats designed to oust incumbent Democrats, breaking the tradition of realigning only after a 10-year census. "On a scale of 1 to 10, Democrats abused their majority status at about a level 5 or 6," Ornstein observed. "Republicans today have moved it to about an 11."

Recent Stories